As New Yorkers were headed to the polls for the start of early voting last week, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic minority leader, made a late-stage campaign appearance in Manhattan to try to fend off an uprising from the left.
The appearance by Mr. Jeffries last Saturday was meant to prop up Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term Democratic incumbent facing an unexpectedly stiff challenge from Darializa Avila Chevalier, a first-time candidate and democratic socialist who has the backing of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
But Mr. Jeffries saw the threat as something larger.
“We’re all committed to doing what’s necessary to make life better for the people of this city and for the people of the country,” Mr. Jeffries said at the campaign event. And to him, that meant rejecting the vigorous push by the Democratic Socialists of America to claim more ground in Congress.
For much of the D.S.A.’s existence, the group focused its resources and endorsements on local and state legislative races, hoping to grow its influence incrementally.
But after the group helped spearhead Mr. Mamdani’s stunning victory last year, the D.S.A.’s calculus has changed. It is now targeting high-profile House races, enlisting some of the 100,000 people who volunteered for the Mamdani campaign to win over voters in gentrifying neighborhoods once thought to be hostile to socialist candidates.
From Washington Heights in Manhattan to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, the organization’s New York City chapter has endorsed candidates in 10 state and federal primaries, the largest slate in its history.
In a section of Brooklyn and Queens that has come to be known as the “commie corridor,” the D.S.A. is backing Claire Valdez, a state assemblywoman, against Antonio Reynoso, the borough president of Brooklyn. Ms. Valdez has the mayor’s support; Mr. Reynoso is endorsed by the current officeholder, Representative Nydia Velázquez, who is retiring this year and was the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress. Ms. Valdez and Mr. Reynoso are both Latino.
The group is also seeking to knock off several incumbent state lawmakers in historically Black neighborhoods like Central Harlem, where Conrad Blackburn is challenging Assemblyman Jordan Wright, the son of Keith Wright, the chairman of the Manhattan Democratic Party. Mr. Blackburn, like Mr. Wright, is Black.
“There’s people in this community who voted for my grandfather, my father, my uncle and myself,” the assemblyman said at a recent visit to an older adult center. Then, referring to Mr. Blackburn, he added, “I don’t know how long he’s been here.”
Other mainstream Democrats have adopted similar language in describing D.S.A.-backed candidates as outsiders looking to usurp political power from longtime residents.
“The individuals that you see here have grown up in that community,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks, chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, said at the event with Mr. Jeffries on Saturday. (For Mr. Jeffries, it was his second event with Mr. Espaillat that day.)
“They know the problems of that community,” Mr. Meeks continued, “and they know how to solve and resolve the problems in those communities.”
Even Mr. Reynoso, who is a progressive Democrat, said in a recent debate that he has not joined the D.S.A. because he didn’t feel comfortable “meeting regularly with a population that is not representative of the entire district,” claiming that the group was “mostly white male.”
Mr. Blackburn, a public defender in the Bronx backed by the D.S.A., seemed to understand how he might be perceived. As he headed to the Manhattanville Houses in West Harlem to knock on voters’ doors, he asked his campaign manager for what he called the “auntie” literature.
He was handed a stack of campaign fliers that were approved by his ad hoc advisory committee of “aunties” — a group of older, mostly Black women who live in the district and want to see him win.
The “auntie lit” features Mr. Blackburn, a D.S.A. member, in a hooded sweatshirt as compared with other fliers in which he i pictured wearing a suit. The hoodie, his aunties advised, made him look more like their grandson than a career politician.
“We’re trying to get the D.S.A. to have a different understanding of how to run a race in these districts.” Mr. Blackburn said.
If the D.S.A. is successful, it could double the number of socialists in the House from two to four, and gain a larger voice in the State Legislature in Albany. Still, some organizers fear the group could lose effectiveness as its members work on more races than ever before.
Top D.S.A. officials convened an emergency meeting on Wednesday, saying they were concerned with the sluggish turnout, particularly among young voters, and that the far fewer doors had been knocked than in the mayoral primary, according to one person who was present for the meeting.
“If we run too many races we could be spread too thin,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a D.S.A. incumbent in Brooklyn who was not at the meeting but is facing a challenge from Marlon Rice, a community organizer who is a moderate. “At the same time, elections bring people in and actually build capacity.”
The D.S.A. has experienced growing pains before. After winning five seats in the Legislature in 2020, the organization failed to capitalize on its momentum in 2022.
“We were very ambitious, and we lost some races very narrowly,” recalled Ms Valdez, who joined the D.S.A. in 2019 and worked on the campaigns of earlier democratic socialist allies like Julia Salazar, a state senator.
Those defeats made Ms. Valdez apprehensive when Mr. Mamdani was gearing up to run for mayor in 2024. She feared he couldn’t win and would drain resources that could otherwise be used on legislative races and advocacy battles.
A loss might have also fed the narrative that their ideological worldview was on the retreat. She said that Mr. Mamdani ended up convincing her that having a D.S.A. member run for citywide office was “a really big risk” worth taking, because it could build the organization and introduce it to a lot of people.
Since October 2024, when the D.S.A. endorsed Mr. Mamdani, membership in the organization has more than doubled to 14,000 from 5,900, according to Gustavo Gordillo, the local D.S.A. chapter’s co-chair.
Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier suggested that their candidacies have generated more grass-roots volunteers to work on other campaigns. Mr. Mamdani’s endorsements have also helped: Mr. Gordillo said that the group has been adding roughly 1,000 volunteers a week after the mayor’s involvement.
In Ms. Avila Chevalier’s race in particular, Mr. Gordillo said more non-D.S.A. members have volunteered for her campaign than members, suggesting that D.S.A. membership could grow considerably after the primary.
Ms. Avila Chevalier said in an interview that her congressional campaign can build on the gains that were made last year when she led the Mamdani campaign’s organizing efforts in Upper Manhattan.
“I think at their core, a lot of people want to see the types of policies that democratic socialism promotes,” she said.
Grace Mausser, a co-chairwoman of the New York City D.S.A., concurred. “Zohran really showed that there is a wide, diverse and quite large coalition of people across the city who are interested in and willing to vote for a socialist,” she said.
Other left-leaning groups have begun to increase their spending in competitive races. Justice Democrats PAC and American Priorities PAC, a pro-Palestinian group, have spent more than $1 million on Ms. Avila Chevalier’s behalf.
Their opponents have responded with ads attacking her social media history, where she profanely attacked Democratic leaders, questioned the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and criticized interracial relationships.
Other ads stuck to the outsider angle. A flier from the National Black Empowerment Action Fund, a group founded by two AIPAC alumni, attacked the D.S.A. as “far out of touch with our values” with plans to push people “out of our own community.”
Demographic shifts have helped the D.S.A.’s expansion plans. In the district Ms. Valdez is seeking to represent, the white population has increased to 40 percent in 2024 from 30 percent in 2014, according to a New York Times analysis.
The Hispanic and Asian populations saw substantial declines there, and there was a large increase in the percentage of the district that is college educated. Nearly half the population now has at least a bachelor’s degree, placing the district among the top six most educated districts in New York State. In 2014, it was in the middle of the pack.
The hope now is that the high-profile runs by Ms. Avila Chevalier and Ms. Valdez will help insurgent candidates running for the State Legislature in overlapping or adjacent districts.
“We have to win these two congressional races if we want to keep growing our power,” Mr. Gordillo said at Wednesday’s D.S.A. meeting, according to one attendee. “The congressional races, they supercharge our down-ballot races.”
Jeff Adelson contributed reporting.
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